Commissioner Kathy Wylde, the former CEO of the Partnership for New York City, responded with a different question: Isn’t the point of this commission to reduce the hurdles on agencies so we don’t have to rely on quasi-governmental entities like the SCA to deliver capital projects?

This exchange captures a debate that has followed public authorities for more than a century: when the government struggles to deliver, should we create institutions that operate outside traditional governmental constraints, or try to reform those constraints themselves?

On the evening of June 9, 2026, around 100 advocates, members of the press, and civics nerds (hi) piled into a large conference room at New York Law School for the first hearing of Mayor Mamdani’s new Charter Revision Commission: the Charter On Government Efficiency (COGE). Cheeky name aside, COGE was established to review the New York City charter -- our city’s governing document -- to “develop proposals to modernize City government, improve service delivery, and strengthen accountability to New Yorkers.” They will do this by traveling the city and holding public hearings and then deliberating. The resulting proposals for changes to the city charter will likely end up on our November ballots.

In this windowless room, two people at a time were called up to testify before the commission. Over the course of the evening, testimony ranged from procurement reform and the Mayor’s Management Report to open primaries and civil service changes.

Several days earlier on a beautiful early summer morning, I opened Gail Radford’s book “The Rise of the Public Authority” in preparation for starting a job at the New York City School Construction Authority later this month.

Public authorities are entities that exist outside the traditional channels of executive control and legislative appropriation. When you take the subway or fly out of one of NY’s 3 airports you are interacting with public authorities: the MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), respectively. While the public most often interacts with authorities through public transportation, they can also do construction (NYC School Construction Authority, NYS Dorimtory Authority) and support economic development (Empire State Development Corporation), among other miscellaneous goals.

So why do we have public authorities? The common conception is that they exist because they deliver services more efficiently than a traditional government agency can, as they are allowed to be run like a business, often with non-partisan experts appointed to their boards. They also have the added strength of being able to generate revenue (as opposed to being appropriated funding from general tax funds), allowing them to escape political unpredictability and even raise capital by issuing revenue bonds, backed by the authorities’ revenue streams.

Radford argues that we are mistaken in this understanding of why they exist. She argues that when we look to history, we will find that public authorities were not created because agencies are inherently incapable of delivering services efficiency, but instead because progressive policy makers interested in doing more for the public good (often in ways that were often overwhelmingly popular with voting public), were left with no choice but to look outside of the government to develop structures to more effectively deliver services and infrastructure projects given constraints on agencies placed by city charters, state legislation, and the courts.

One such recurring problem was debt limits. New York governments often wanted to build infrastructure but faced constitutional or statutory restrictions on how much debt they could issue directly. Authorities provided a workaround: because they were legally separate entities, they could borrow money and finance projects without those obligations appearing on government balance sheets in the same way. What looks today like an administrative choice was often a response to legal and financial constraints.

Authorities also frequently escaped procurement, civil service, and approval processes that legislators had created to prevent corruption but which reformers increasingly viewed as barriers to building infrastructure at the speed they desired.

However, as Radford writes, “despite the appeal of authorities, the choice to build government capacity using what is essentially a strategy of circumvention comes with real costs. Chief among these is fragmentation of governance power, undermining the ability of elected officials to chart broad policy directions to promote balanced development and greater equality -- goals that the private sector is frequently incapable of achieving on its own.”

Back in the drabby room at New York Law School, when Gale Brewer asked how we could make the Department of Design and Construction (DDC) more similar to the School Construction Authority (SCA) in its ability to deliver capital projects effectively, we can understand that she is looking for ways past the constraints of government agencies to deliver more for the public.

Kathy Wylde’s response encapsulates the other side of the coin. Brewer’s question assumes that the SCA’s effectiveness stems from features unique to the authority model. Wylde’s response asks whether those features are unique to authorities, or are instead just freedoms that government agencies have been denied. We’ve spent decades building workarounds. Should charter reform focus on creating more workarounds, or should it remove the conditions that made them necessary?1

The exchange was particularly striking to me because in a few weeks I will begin work at the School Construction Authority itself. Before opening Radford’s book, I mostly thought of authorities in terms of what they do differently. After attending the hearing, I’m increasingly interested in what successful authorities reveal about the governmental systems they were created to work around.

Radford’s answer is that authorities emerged not because reformers disliked government, but because they were trying to accomplish things that existing governmental structures struggled to deliver. Faced with legal, institutional, and financial obstacles, many chose to work around them rather than confront them directly.

Or, as Mayor Ed Koch reportedly put it: “Authorities are the path of least resistance.”2

The question that COGE should be asking is what successful authorities reveal about where charter changes can improve efficiency.

Many underrate how much the physical environment teaches behavior by making certain actions ordinary, visible, and frictionless. These changes affect what feels possible. Temporary urbanism is powerful because it quickly changes lived experience, temporarily expanding collective imagination and creating constituencies for permanent change. But if these interventions are not stabilized materially, reversion pressure gradually constricts those possibilities again.

Cities are full of old decisions that continue educating us decades after the people who built them are gone. Highways, architecture, and public recreational spaces all change how we interact with the world around us, and therefore what we expect and collectively think is possible in the world.

The Existing Equilibrium:

In the absence of temporary infrastructure, our collective mental model hovers around what the existing infrastructure enables.1 Individuals constantly imagine new things, pushing past the boundaries of the collective mental model, however these rarely change the imaginations of others.

Most of us think of streets as places for parking, driving, and the occasional bike lane as this is what we see. Some might imagine that the streets could be a place for sporting, childs play, or eating, but that is not a part of the collective mental model as it is divorced from the physical reality we engage with.

Temporary Infrastructure Expands the Mental Model

When temporary infrastructure is introduced, for example during the pandemic, the collective mental model expands to contain that piece of infrastructure. Those using outdoor dining now know that is possible, if not desirable. At this point, imagination expands to further frontiers. For example, we might now imagine urban forests or beer gardens.

When Possibility Becomes Permanent

If we are able to make this new infrastructure permanent, the collective mental model expands to meet that new infrastructure. The result is that we arrive at a new equilibrium where imagination begins anew and we can continue to adapt until we are comfortable.

Protected bike lanes in cities like Amsterdam or Copenhagen no longer feel radical because they have persisted long enough to become ordinary. Infrastructure that once expanded imagination now defines the baseline from which new possibilities emerge.

Time Pressure and the Collapse of Possibility

However, when the temporary infrastructure is removed, the expanded mental model is under pressure from time. People are reeducated by the existing infrastructure and the collective begins to forget that the temporary infrastructure is possible, save for the fervent. This does not happen immediately and leaves time for the infrastructure to be made permanent.

As outdoor dining has ended, as the years go on many have readjusted to NYC as it was but on a nice evening twitter will still show that many of us remember and long for the old days. Luckily, this has become a political consensus and so we will likely get it back.

Present day NYC

In NYC, we see temporary infrastructure all the time. In 2009, Janette Sadik Khan put out new chairs in Times Square prior to the redesign of the new plaza. In the pandemic we saw the proliferation of open streets and outdoor dining. Today, we have Summer Streets, School Streets, and Open Streets that all temporarily highlight alternate ways public space can be used.

Recently, Street Labs and the NYC DOT announced that they will run “soccer streets” in the open streets outside of NYC schools for 2 months prior to the World Cup. This is a brilliant maneuver that uses the concept I call “induced identity” to build a constituency.

Other than getting many young people excited about soccer, soccer streets will create a new life experience and accompanying sense of possibility about how streets can accommodate fun. However this will only largely impact the people who get a chance to experience it. If we do not capitalize on the expanded mental model, eventually many of them will also forget that child friendly streets are genuinely possible for the long term.

Outro

It is not always politically easy to introduce temporary infrastructure let alone solidify it, but if we want different futures to persist, we cannot rely on imagination alone: we must expand possibility through temporary infrastructure and then solidify the expanded possibilities before the physical world reasserts itself.

As we reflect on the vibrant days of outdoor dining when there was a creative energy in the air, let’s hope that the city council makes the moves required to bring this important program back in a permanent fashion. Otherwise, the concrete will have proven heavier than our imaginations.

We might think to prohibit these behaviors, whether through signs, fences, or laws. However, in situations where there is no place for the behavior to go, there is another powerful option: redirect it to a designated location.

A few weeks ago, New York City opened its first deliverista hub outside City Hall Park, with more planned. It offers NYC’s roughly 80,000 app-based delivery workers, known as Deliveristas, a 24/7 rest area and recharging station for their phones and ebikes. However, it also serves another purpose: with its amenities, it pulls Deliveristas into one place. If it goes according to plan, this will not only make their lives easier, but clear up sidewalks, reduce battery fires, and allow for more effective outreach.

By examining the logic behind this, we can analyze when and how this kind of intervention works.

When There Is Nowhere Else for Behavior to Go

There is a civic design pattern hiding in plain sight: In situations where a persistent behavior creates public conflict despite efforts to suppress it, managing it spatially benefits those doing the behavior, those upset by it, and those attempting to manage its externalities. When the situation and intervention align, this works remarkably well.

We know this logic from skate parks. Skateboarders, if given nowhere to go but still interested in recreating with their friends, do tricks in family parks creating “public disorder”. Since prohibition doesn’t stop them, and we want them to be able to recreate, we create skate parks with half pipes. Now they have a better place to skate, and the other park users have the quiet family park they wanted.

This highlights an important success criteria: the alternative space has to be genuinely desirable. Creating a skate park with a half pipe produces a space that skaters genuinely want to use, causing all parties to benefit and not requiring enforcement. While some bad faith actors might still use family parks, most will do something that genuinely improves their experience.

Let’s take another example: the dog rest area. Currently dogs in NYC are told many places not to pee without being told a meaningful place to pee.1 The result is the scent of baking urine in the summer and pee soaked tree beds. If we instead provided dogs a place to pee, that they actually used, we could hose it down easily and it would smell less than if the pee was not centralized to begin with.

This illuminates another strength of this logic: Concentration creates a new opportunity to mitigate the negative externalities of the behavior.

When Centralizing Fails

Providing a persistent behavior a place to go has the potential to benefit every party. However, real world circumstances often get in the way. The new location provided might not attract the desired group, or the centralization can work perfectly but be infeasible for external reasons.

We can see this in the occasional disregard for protected bike lanes. Protected bike lanes attempt to pull biking behavior into a safer and more orderly space by providing bikers a place to go. This is also intended to ensure that bikes don’t end up on sidewalks or going the wrong way. However, New Yorkers can attest to the fact that, while most bikers use these lanes, it is still extremely common to see bikers on sidewalks, in the car lanes, or going the wrong way down a bike lane despite a nearby lane being in the right direction. Even when a place is provided to accommodate a behavior, it will not always be used. In these situations, unfortunately enforcement might become necessary.2

Another failure mode can be seen in season 3 of “The Wire”. Major “Bunny” Colvin is a Baltimore district commander pressured to lower his crime numbers. He can’t arrest his way out of the drug trade. So, he finds a cluster of abandoned blocks at the edge of his district and tells dealers they won’t be arrested there. As the buyers follow, they leave the residential streets clear. Public health researchers show up and start running needle exchanges, blood testing, and condom distribution. By its own operational logic the experiment was successful, but once City Hall discovers the experiment, it collapses under political and institutional pressure.

Centralization is not always morally or politically neutral. As behaviors become more harmful, contentious, or stigmatized, the ethics of concentrating, rather than suppressing, them become significantly more complicated. As we can see, even when the logic accomplishes its goal, it can fail for other reasons.

Another reason centralizing might fail can be seen in the example of the Deliversita hub: In a moment when immigrants are rightfully wary, the largely immigrant Deliversita population might not want to be concentrated. Even when the perks are there, there can be unrelated risks of concentration.

A Design Question

Cities will continue to face behaviors that persist despite deterrence. It is essential to understand why, when, and how we should accommodate them. While we shouldn’t accommodate every persistent behavior, we should stop reaching for prohibition before asking where the behavior could go instead.

More times than we give it credit for, the question is not whether behavior exists, but whether cities shape where it happens.

The physical world we’ve built has a chokehold on what we think is possible. This is because infrastructure creates self-reinforcing systems that shape what feels possible.

To escape this chokehold, we need to understand how it works, and how we can take advantage of it.

What’s Actually Happening

Example: A good bike lane doesn’t just allow biking, it makes biking easier, which produces bikers. This eventually makes biking normal, which changes what cities think is possible, which leads to more bike lanes.

I call this the induced possibility loop. It’s the process by which infrastructure creates self-reinforcing systems that shape what feels possible.1

What matters most is what happens after a new sense of what’s possible takes hold.

How New Possibilities Expand

1. Spread (New locations)

The original infrastructure is built in new locations as it travels as a best practice.

Example 1: Dutch style protected bike lanes are built in Seattle and Cambridge.

Example 2: After congestion pricing worked in cities around the world, it spread to NYC.

2. Deepening (Supporting Systems)

Supporting infrastructure is produced that is demanded as people pick up a new behavior.

Example 1: As people bike more, bike parking lots and bike rental services are established.

Example 2: Higher quality train stations and better train service are demanded to serve those affected by congestion pricing.

3. Imagination (New Infrastructure Ideas)

When one piece of infrastructure expands what people think is possible, it can create demand, and belief in the possibility of entirely new kinds of systems.

Example 1: The adoption of bike lanes changes how people experience streets. Once streets feel like places for people, not just cars, ideas like outdoor dining or more green space start to feel possible.

Example 2: The success of congestion pricing changed how people think about pricing as a policy tool. Once you’ve seen pricing change behavior at scale, extensions seem obvious. Cap and Invest schemes, charging for parking by demand, and extended producer responsibility all start to feel like obvious next steps.

One change in infrastructure can turn into many as each one shifts what people expect and demand next. Good interventions can expand what feels possible.

But this same process can also trap us.

Why So Little Feels Possible

The loop is currently clogged.

With the same designs everywhere, we begin to mistake them for inevitabilities. So little feels possible in our country: we are dominated by highways and suburbs, spanning a whole continent, which have reinforced the same behaviors, norms, and mental models for almost a century. If you’ve never seen anything else, this might just seem like the way the world has to be.

Even when people know more is possible, they often can’t change the infrastructure. Political and bureaucratic incentives often prevent new infrastructure from being built or scaled even when what feels possible has shifted. We continue to invest in “just another lane” when we understand better alternatives exist.2

But hope is not lost.

Despite the current suffocation our collective imagination, the right change will still multiply greatly. We can re-expand what feels possible.

To do this we have to make sure we are investing our time and effort in the right places. Many attempts at social change focus on shifting norms or making awareness without changing the underlying environment. These efforts often stall because they work against the loop, not with it. In fact we even know what to do: If a desired behavior isn’t happening, change the infrastructure. We overlook that culture is, in many cases, downstream of what is easy.

How to Use The Loop

So where should we look to make change? The loop guides us to some natural starting points.

Is there pro-social behavior happening despite infrastructure?

If so, if infrastructure were to enable it there would likely be a massive explosion of behavior.

Example: Are people picking up litter despite there being no infrastructure to enable this behavior? If so, that is a sign there is demand.

Is messaging doing all the work?

If there’s a pro-social behavior that demands constant messaging to elicit compliance, that’s a strong signal that the desired outcome isn’t easy enough to comply with given the current affordances.

Example: The amount of “curb your dog” signs in NYC implies a larger systemic problem.

Did an infrastructure change work better than expected?

If so, what working principle could be extrapolated? Are there other domains this could translate to?

Example: After the success of congestion pricing, what other behavior could we apply the mechanism of using pricing to make a behavior more or less attractive?

Examples:

For applied examples, these are two topics I’ve dug in on which focus on making a behavior that could change a norm easier.

Future City Sketches

"Curb Your Dog" Signs Don't Work. Here's What Does.

It’s a cold NYC night, loud with the sounds of trucks. My family’s dog, a Jack Russell Terrier named Miss Penny Lane, trembles with fear as we get in the elevator. Walking out of our warm building, she runs toward the tree bed right outside the door. If I let her have her way, she will jump the tree guard, pee immediately, and run right back to the door…

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4 months ago · 23 likes · 1 comment · Jack Neiberg

Future City Sketches

The Hidden Social Rule That Keeps Parks Dirty

The Problem: Social Permission…

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4 months ago · 24 likes · 4 comments · Jack Neiberg

Seeing the Loop

What feels possible in the world is stuck because the infrastructure we rely on is stuck, and the way we try to make change often doesn’t work.

Next time you’re going for a walk, try to spot the invisible loops. Once you see it, every street starts to look different.

This is part of Future City Sketches, a series exploring how small interventions can reshape what feels possible in public systems.

I’m working on a deeper write-up of the full model and I’m happy to share if you’re interested!

For a video overview of this topic:

Yesterday, March 22nd, I attended the first “Data Docs” series held as a part of NYC Open Data Week. After 7 hours of documentaries and Q&As, I walked away confident in the role that documentaries play in exploring the tapestry that is our city.

Of the three films I watched, each explored a different thread, and in doing so highlighted something about the city itself. They show the depth of human experience that lies beyond simple analytical policy discussions.

Changing Lanes

Dir. Ben Wolf, 2025, 75 min

www.changinglanesdoc.com/

This documentary followed the contentious story Mcguiness Boulevard street redesign, a community led movement to have a “road diet” on a notoriously dangerous road in Greenpoint. There was high quality footage from extremely heated community meetings that would surprise the unitiatiated with their intensity. This documentary was a love letter to and time capsule of 2020s NYC urbanism.

It tackled topics such as the physical environment, urbanism, biking, and theories of social change through the built environment. There were many times when things said by David Byrnes (who I was surprised to learn is such an avid urban biker), Janette Sadik-Khan and others could have been quoted directly from essays I am currently working on.

Synthesis: Infrastructure, because it is always embedded with values, reflects competing beliefs about what a city should be. This means ideologically charged political warfare can ensue over what might seem like a small physical object.

Through The Night

Dir. Loira Limbal, 2021, 76 mins

www.throughthenightdocumentary.com/

This documentary welcomed us into the world of home-based childcare provider Deloris “NuNu” Hogan and her business “Dee’s Tots Daycare” in New Rochelle. It heartwarmingly and heartbreakingly highlighted the hard, and often invisible, work and dedication that working mothers put into their communities, as well as the difficulty of working mothers to get by.

In the current New York discourse, this shows an extremely successful home-based child care business at a time when New York State has to figure out what Universal Child Care will look like. This beautiful documentary shows us the potential of home-based child care to create not just a community but a home for children while their parents work.

Synthesis: Essential social systems often rely on compassionate human labor that we overlook when we zoom out. Despite being deeply necessary and often socially valued, it is under-supported structurally.

Emergent City

Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, Kelly Anderson, 2024, 95 mins

www.emergentcitydoc.com/

For others passionate about NYC land use systems, this was a uniquely fleshed out look at the failed rezoning of Industry City in Sunset Park.

As someone who reads, goes to events, and listens to podcasts to understand the full sides of an issue, this documentary provided something I did not realize I could get: a multi-lens, multi-stakeholder inside look at the motivations, complications, and conflicts of a city rezoning. If anything, it could have been longer and encompassed more sides of the issue, implications, and situated itself in the larger context of NYC land use, however that is not to be expected from a 90 minute documentary.

Full of insider conversations I am surprised we have the chance to hear, this documentary remained mostly impartial and did not attempt to give a clean black and white answer. We are able to sympathize with all the stakeholders and dfiferent moments, and most importantly gain context and experience that we can bring to other conversations in the future. This documentary immortalized a specific attempted rezoning as a case study of how local politics works to be studied by future generations. It was also beautiful visually.

Synthesis: When engaging the diverse stakeholders involved in a single geographical place, understandable conflict ensues as structural, career, and ideological incentives are pitted against one another.

Conclusion

All three films show that the fabric that makes up our city is woven by human experience, despite being organized by overlapping institutions and structures. This human tapestry can be easy to miss if we don’t look closely. Documentaries offer a unique way to follow these threads more closely and flesh out a mental model of how they are stitched together.

I will definitely attend events like this in the future. Many thanks to those who hosted it as well as the documentarians.

Government programs often struggle to reach the people they are designed to serve. One overlooked reason is that interacting with government services can be surprisingly difficult. Confusing forms, complex applications, and fragmented systems create what researchers call a “time tax,” or administrative burden.

Have you ever needed to stop to look something up while filling out a confusing form? Or worse, find someone to ask for help? We all know this frustration, but behind the scenes it has even more negative effects than we realize. Confusing services make government programs more expensive and less effective. This post explains how ‘administrative burden’ creates these hidden costs, how better service design can reduce them, and highlights a few teams already doing this work.

All bureaucracies produce confusing paperwork, but the constraints of government can produce uniquely challenging interactions. When interacting with a government service requires excessive time and effort from users, researchers refer to it as a “time tax” or “administrative burden.”1 We all face this ‘time tax’ in tax season, but the burden is hardest on those who interact with government services frequently, such as benefits recipients, builders, or small businesses. For example, New Yorkers wading through the fragmented benefits ecosystem are required to submit documents and answer confusing questions often through systems that are difficult to access or understand. Missing a single step can delay or derail an application entirely.

Time Tax / Administrative Burden: The costs to people interacting with government programs in terms of time spent navigating user-unfriendly interfaces.

Behind the veil of government, this paperwork produces an additional cost: the burden posed on the employees who have to process it. Think about it like this: every time you are confused and need support due to a preventable confusion, someone has to spend that time supporting you. Every time you submit burdensome paperwork, someone has to process it, likely on outdated technology. This means the time of agency staff and constituent liaisons, that we fund, is funneled away from other work. In extreme cases, entire call centers, nonprofit programs, or even businesses exist solely to help people navigate these systems. This is often not the fault of applicants or frontline staff, but a result of systems that are not aligned with current needs. This damages the morale of public servants, reduces citizens trust in government, and results in inefficient public spending.

Why Fixing Government Services Is Hard

There might seem like an obvious fix: make things simpler! From an outside perspective it’s easy to view this as a problem of bureaucratic incompetence. However, like most problems in government, if you look closely you will find smart, passionate people wading upstream through structural binds. For NYC, what are some of these structural constraints?

One is that many of the largest government programs are funded by the federal government (think SNAP, Medicaid, Section 8, Federal Tax Credits) through “Block Grants” to states and municipalities. These grants require the states and municipalities to fit requirements, such as confusing and rigid terms and questions. The resulting confusion and paperwork can cost millions more to process. In some cases, this complexity is not accidental, but even where there is no deliberate intent, many of the same burdens emerge. 2

There are structural hurdles even in situations where city administrators or legislators have more control (think CityFHEPS, SCRIE/DRIE, Building permits.) For example, contrary to popular belief, “the government” does not have all your data. In fact, on the city level, data is very siloed between agencies and protected by strict privacy laws, and much of this data is stored in ancient technology. Those with AI dreams will be frustrated to learn this.

There is another systemic problem: the rush of the budget cycle. Beyond just being frustrating, confusing services can create a reinforcing loop inside government budgets. These cycles are financial, but the result is that programs can fail to reach the people they were designed to serve.

As confusing services increase costs, they increase budget pressure which results in more rushed budget cuts as the city struggles to fit its annual balanced budget requirement. Administrations and agencies are incentivized to look for savings in the present, which can make it hard to invest in simplifying services for the future. However more importantly than costs, this means that programs are not accomplishing their goals of serving residents.

The Solution: How Service Design Reduces Administrative Burden

A clear way to pull ourselves out of this loop is to make the services less confusing. Luckily, there is a more easily addressable constraint here: the lack of technical capacity in behavioral design.3 Behavioral Design / Service Design4 can teach us how to accommodate human needs to ensure successful experiences.5 This happens by iteratively and frequently prototyping and then testing with end users to arrive at a smooth product. The result of this process is effective, accessible, and dignified services.

Smoother government services reduces the time tax on residents, increase trust in government, and sometimes relieve some of the budget pressure that distracts political energy from system-level improvements.

When I was a fellow at the Service Design Studio in the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, I was lucky enough to be exposed to some of the great people and teams doing work in this domain.

Examples of Service Design Improving Government

Many organizations and government teams are already working to reduce administrative burden through better service design. This is a short list that is not comprehensive.

The NYC.Gov Redesign

About the NYC.Gov Redesign

NYC.Gov was recently comprehensively redesigned with user-centered methods. This will continue to roll out across NYC government websites and is an exciting opportunity to streamline content and information architecture along the way.
In my understanding, the movement for smooth government portals was pioneered by the Government Digital Service in the UK.

About the UK Government Digital Service

Plain Language Training Resources for Government Staff

Plain Language Writing is a clear skill that government employees can learn to increase the effectiveness their outreach materials, applications, web content and more.

To learn more, here is a video advertising Plain Language Writing I made while at the Service Design Studio.

More Plain Language Materials

Form Redesign Workshops

Another cool opportunity is to deliberately up-skill city employees in behavioral design. The Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity organized a Form Redesign Workshop with Ideas42 to coach teams in applying behavioral design. The first cohort went very well and was documented in this blog post (which I may have helped write).

Organizations Advancing Service Design in Government:

If you are interested, there are many more organizations that do this work. This is not a comprehensive list but I offer it for your perusing.

• Public Policy Lab

• Ideas42

• Beeck Center for Social Innovation Digital Government Hub

• NAVA

• The former US Digital Service and 18F

Why This Work Matters

Better service design can save money, but more importantly it means that government programs actually work better for the people they are meant to serve. When services are easier to use, more residents access benefits, trust improves, and administrative costs often fall as a side effect. Investing in better service design will not solve every problem in government, but it is one of the most practical ways to make public programs work better for the people they are meant to serve.

This post breaks down the design logic behind that experiment and shows how it could be tested elsewhere. If you’re curious about the design thinking behind the idea, you’ll find the framework here. If you’re someone who wants to try something similar in your neighborhood or organization, you’ll also find a practical pilot plan.

The Design Logic Behind Dog Pee Behavior

Dogs tend to pee where other dogs pee, which is known as countermarking. This produces a reinforcing loop. That means an effective solution will establish a new reinforcing loop and then redirect dogs there.

Core Principle:

If we try to fight against a self-reinforcing loop, we will face heavy resistance.

If we play into the self-reinforcing loop, solutions will scale naturally.

While addressing this core dog behavior is the smoothest solution, we can also look at the reasons humans let their dogs pee on trees: or as I call it, the care gap. Most of us care about trees on a social level, whether for climate, wellbeing, or budget efficiency. However, individuals aren’t acting in alignment with that value. There are 3 ways we can address a value gap: resolve it, bypass it, or transform it. These apply differently to every situation and are not created equally. In this case, to be effective they must work in the constraints of our reinforcing feedback loop. Curb Your Dog signs and tree guards do not work because they try to fight the loop instead of playing into it.

Three Ways Cities Can Address Dog Pee on Trees

Educate Dog Owners

We could try to resolve this care gap by educating people as to how their individual behavior of letting dogs pee on trees is in conflict with their societal value of healthy trees. This assumes that knowledge is the gap, and is likely not enough to solve the problem because it trys to fight against the loop. It is still has value as a way to reinforce the new loop if set up.

What should education be like?

If this is an education strategy, it has to fit on a small tree sign and actually change behavior. That means:

• Plain language.

• Catchy and memorable.

• Short enough.

• Explains that it is bad.

Here are potential LinkNYC and Tree Bed Sign designs that align with this:

Redesign Tree Beds

Instead of making people care more about trees, we could try to transform the tree bed into something they do care about. This still asks people to care, but about something other than the tree. This lets us get creative, however it still trys to work against the loop and as a result is not a solution. It could however support redirecting dogs to a place to pee.

How can we make a tree bed a place someone wouldn’t let their dog pee?

This requires identifying things people would not let their dogs pee on:

• Seating: Placing a bench, table, or chairs around a tree bed.

• Something Cute: Emphasizing that a child cares greatly about the tree.

• Beautiful Flowers: Beautifying the tree bed and then guilting the walker.

Provide a Dog Pee Area (The Most Promising Solution)

Instead of making people care, we could bypass caring by instead providing a more convenient place to bring your dog. Because dogs pee where other dogs pee, if we give a place for dogs to pee and give owners a reason to bring their dog there (free poop bags, Signs that say “your dog can pee here”, etc) it will take care of itself, as I witnessed on my block.

What would a dog rest area need to be like?

This would need to be somewhere dogs want to pee that their owners will bring them. This means:

• Be Accessible

• Advertise itself well. People need to think about bringing their dog there.

• Be maintainable

• Be cheap and easy to replicate

• Not require enforcement

This is not a ridiculous idea, it is done in airports as well as just across the river in Hoboken.

Bypassing works with the feedback loop, and therefore is our core solution.

How to Run a Dog Pee Pilot in Your Neighborhood:

Who can actually do something about this? There are many players in the fragmented NYC tree ecosystem.1 However, I believe that a Business Improvement District (BID) interested in public realm innovation would be the most promising pilot target, and I plan on reaching out to a few to talk about it. (If you work at a BID and are reading this and are interested or know anyone, let me know!)

Choosing a Pilot Location:

• High dog density

• Maintenance capacity

• Near running water + storm drain

• Ability to oversee

• Visible signage

• Visible site

• Not served by existing dog run

• Near trees so we can track change

Materials:

• 4’x4’ Turf square + Replacement

• Sign saying: “Your dog can pee here.”

  • Addittional advertising signage nearby

• Dog waste bag dispenser

• Hydrant or visual anchor

• Maintenance partner (Ideally near a hose and drain)

• Volunteer or staff to inform dog walkers of pilot

Estimated Cost:

• 2 4’x4’ pieces of Turf: 80$

• Sign: 30-50$

• Additional printed signage: 5$

• Bag dispenser: 20-40$

• Total: Approximately 175$

Maintenance:

• Daily - Weekly rinse, depending on conditions

• Volunteer (me) or staff to tell people in the area of the pilot and ask them to try bringing their dog there.

How to Measure Success:

• Reduced staining at adjacent tree beds (done by pre/post trial pictures? Or just watching for an hour a few different days and counting?)

• Visible use within first week

• Dog walkers redirect voluntarily

If You Want To Try This:

Curious Reader:

Keep an eye out for opportunities in your area and see how you can get involved! Look for potential feedback loops and reach out to me if you have any ideas you want to bounce around. Additionally, feel free to try my signage or transformation ideas and let me know how they go.

Local organizer:

Try a small pilot with a block association or BID. Here is a one-pager I developed advocating for this proposal, feel free to use if it is helpful.

Dog Pee One Pager

383KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

City staff, BID, nonprofit, etc:

Reach out if you’d like help designing or evaluating a pilot, or just to bounce ideas!

Email me at Jack@Neiberg.com

As we get ready to leave the basketball court, I hesitate. Black plastic bags and empty Arizona bottles are scattered along the edge of the court. Should I just walk around and pick them up quickly? After all, the trash can is right there, but there are a lot of people around. I decide not to.

We often frame the problem of clean public space as one of litterers behaving badly. That framing pushes us toward solutions aimed at stopping bad behavior. But there is another way to look at it: what if the real opportunity lies with people who might be willing to pick trash up when they notice it? Even if only a small number of people acted on that impulse, many spaces could quickly become cleaner.

I believe this is a problem of social permission. Social permission is not what society formally allows, but the unwritten structures that inform what behavior we think is acceptable. So how do we create social permission? Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t just come from the ideas in our head, but also from the physical environment helping us act in new ways. What if instead of trying to persuade people, we changed which actions were visible and easy?

The Solution: Visible Civic Affordances

Visible Civic Affordances

Small tools or features in public space that make pro-social behavior easy, visible, and socially legitimate, helping new norms emerge.

I just used a big word: Affordances. Affordances are just the characteristics of an object that suggest how it can be used. A door handle invites pulling. A bench invites sitting. A trash grabber invites cleaning.

Trying to create a norm through an instruction often creates resistance. Visible civic affordances work because they show the behavior through humans. When someone sees another person easily performing an action in public space, it signals that the behavior is possible, acceptable, and even expected. Over time, this can spread and produce social norms.

In the context of parks, a trash grabber might be a good small example. In the same way that having a shovel in a blizzard gives us the option to clear a crosswalk, a trash grabber changes what actions feel available to us. We no longer need to bend down or touch garbage to pick it up. However, what the tools presence suggests might be even more important than the new ways to pick up trash it allows.

A trash grabber advertises that picking up trash is an allowed, if not expected, behavior in the park. When a behavior becomes visible and easy, it can spread socially. Artifacts can create social permission. However, many interventions like this don’t end up achieving their goals. What determines if they work or not?

Why Some Interventions Change Behavior and Others Don’t

There are many ways we can think about what makes a successful intervention (and I will explore more of them in the future), but for now we will use a simple model: behavior spreads when it is a) visible and b) easy to adopt. When a behavior is invisible or difficult, it rarely spreads.

Grocery stores used this principle decades ago when creating shopping cart corrals (the place you return a cart) by making the socially expected behavior both visible and easy. This example is so intuitive that we might not even think of it as design intervention. They advertise themselves, sit right where people exit stores, and don’t make anyone’s life harder. As a result this is such a norm that we can’t imagine a world without it. When tools make a behavior visible and easy, that behavior can become the norm.1

How does this apply to our trash grabber example? Well, depending on how it is placed, a trash grabber sitting unused in a park might have low visibility, but once one person uses it, the behavior becomes extremely visible. Picking up trash is not a frictionless behavior to add to your routine, but unlike a shopping cart corral, it doesn’t need to be. We are specifically targeting only the people who would pick up litter but rarely do so.

In the context of New York City, this is not meant to argue that we don’t need containerization, stewardship programs, or marketing campaigns. Instead, I’m arguing that trash grabbers can help those other interventions succeed by recruiting already motivated New Yorkers to help and making participation visible and easy. As a bonus, the visible act of cleaning may itself discourage future litter.

A Simple Experiment

Promisingly, this idea is cheap, easy to set up, and easy to undo. In fact all we need to do is install one and see if people use it.

This would require picking a park, partnering with a group like a Business Improvement District, park conservancy, or neighborhood group, and finding a place to put it. For our “before” condition we would observe and evaluate existing litter levels and park user behavior.

Then for our test we would install a trash grabber with a sign like “Keep Our Park Clean!” and attach a sticker that says “if found please return to [this] park!”

For one month, through observations we can see if people use the grabber, walk past it, pick up trash without it, or even steal it. Conversations with park users would provide qualitative feedback.

You might immediately think that these will get stolen. As a New Yorker, I agree that this is definitely possible or even probable, but that it is still worth testing. Site selection and placement within the park would play a large part in the likelihood of theft. This should be viewed as a part of the experiment and accounted for with multiple backup grabbers. For the sake of future policy decisions it is worth knowing if a trash graber accomplishes its goal, and if it does get stolen, how long it would take before someone took it. Luckily this is closer to a $50 question than a $5 million one.

How can we increase our civic affordances?

Trash grabbers are just one prototype that emerges from this way of thinking. If many people already want cleaner parks but lack social permission to act, the question is not just how to stop litterers. It’s how we can design public spaces that make helpful behavior visible and easy. Objects are not neutral. They signal what behavior belongs in a place.

Leverage Points and Why Physical Design Is Usually Overlooked

We all want to find places where small changes produce large effects. Donella Meadows called those places “leverage points.” In her essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,1 she ranked where interventions can have the most impact.

At the top of her list is something with an intimidating name: paradigm-level shifts. A paradigm shift is a term for when the model we use to think about the world changes because we realize it no longer applies. This just means the story we quietly assume about how the world works changes. If you’re familiar with paradigm shifts, you might think of scientific revolutions2, but paradigms also shape everyday civic life. Ideas like “parking is sacred,” “government can’t do big things well,” and “dogs are urban nuisances” are stories we absorb simply by engaging with the world as it is set up. In the pandemic, outdoor dining disrupted one of these stories by making a different use of curb space suddenly feel normal. To Meadows, these stories are the deepest leverage points in the system because usually when we find a mismatch between what we believe and how we act, we try to fix it. If paradigms shape behavior at the deepest level, the question becomes: how do they change?

These shifts are not always easy to come by, which is why I’m interested in something much lower on her list: the physical infrastructure of the world. She says that, “physical structure is crucial in a system, but rarely a leverage point, because changing it is rarely quick or simple.” New Yorkers definitely know that physical changes are often neither quick nor simple. After all, it’s been 50 years and we’re still waiting for the Second Avenue Subway to be done. However, some structures are easier to change than we assume, and some of these small changes punch above their weight because they change our expectations. This is not to say that all urban design will change society, but certain small physical changes can subtly reshape what feels possible. The dog pee station is a very small example; outdoor dining is a large one.

How Physical Infrastructure Changes What Feels Possible

New Yorkers will intuitively know that physical infrastructure affects the paradigm. I know that when I leave NYC, and have to get into a car to get literally anywhere that I’m surprised people there view it as normal. I know they feel surprised when they come here and realize our default is the subway. Whether it’s the subway or a highway, physical infrastructure mediates our relationship with our city. The subway doesn’t just change how we get around, it changes the story we tell ourselves about society.

It’s easy to get caught up thinking of urban design as Robert Moses-era highways destroying communities, but it is also Paseo Park in Queens, school street programs, public bathrooms, and the DOT “summer streets.” Each of these smaller scale NYC programs change what we expect from public space. Those of us who witnessed Outdoor Dining know that these shifts don’t just change how we think, they change how we will act and design in the future.

What Makes an Urban Design Change a True Leverage Point

If we can find urban design interventions that people don’t have strong opinions about, are relatively cheap and quick to implement, actually change behavior, and do so in a way that take on a life of their own, we can shift the paradigm. These are changes that are small enough to implement but big enough to change what we think is possible. When infrastructure makes a behavior easy and visible, it becomes normal. When it becomes normal, what feels possible starts to shift. Once what feels possible shifts, other changes start to compound (I’ll explore that idea more in a future piece.)

A Small Example: Redirecting Dog Behavior

One example of this dynamic appeared on my block. Providing dogs a clear place to pee redirected them away from trees almost immediately. Something as simple as a sign that said “your dog can pee here!”, putting down some fake grass and adding a fake fire hydrant changed how a whole block of dog walkers behaved. Because of its visibility and behavior changing nature, even a small win like this can subtly change what we think local government is capable of. This intervention fits our criteria. It is visible, organically invites behavior change, becomes natural very quickly, and tells a new story about the role of government and public space in our city. In a future post, I’ll walk through what it would actually take to design and pilot an intervention like this in NYC.

So, if you’re looking for leverage, don’t just look at federal policy or elections. Look around you for small, visible interventions that alter what feels possible. As we’ve seen, they might change more than we expect.

As I post more I will flesh out proposals I have that I think fit this framework. If you have any ideas let me know and let’s talk!

Every busy dog owner faces the same question: when and where do our dogs go out? There are countless places we are told not to let them pee, marked with “Curb your dog” signs and tree guards…

But they clearly don’t work.

This is not just some prudish issue, it has costs for our green infrastructure that cools sidewalks, absorb stormwater, clean air, and make dense blocks livable. This is because Dog Urine Has Acute Impacts on Soil Chemistry in Urban Greenspaces. When a tree lives in a concrete box, there’s nowhere for pee to go when it rains. In a time of increasing droughts, the “Salt also draws out water from tree roots, further compounding water loss and simulating the effects of drought.”3

Additionally, dog pee produces the smell of baking urine that combines with baking trash to make that distinct NYC summer smell.

Dog pee is an inevitable byproduct of having dogs in NYC which clearly produces undesirable effects. However, when there is any conversation about dog pee, it revolves around how to stop dogs from peeing places, not about where they should instead pee to reduce these undesirable effects.4

So, instead of trying to message harder about where dogs shouldn’t pee, what if we instead provide a place for dogs to pee that reduces their undesirable effects?

Why Dogs Pee on Trees: Countermarking

Next time you’re on the street and notice dog pee, see if there are other pee stains nearby. I’d predict there are. It turns out dogs actually want to pee where other dogs pee.

Dogs follow scent, not signs, which makes a reinforcing feedback loop.

This means our real task is to:

1. Identify a new place for a reinforcing loop that is compatible with urban life and realistic.

2. Redirect dogs to that new loop.

   

In fact, we already know this works. This same mechanism is employed in airports, but private developments, like this one I saw in Hoboken, have also adopted building dog pee rest areas. Instead of stopping dogs from peeing, they simply provide a desirable place for the dogs to pee that addresses the concerns.

Why ‘Curb Your Dog’ Signs Don’t Work

The phrase “curb your dog” was not well received even when it debuted. In fact, the double use of “curb” is so confusing that in 1956, two Harvard law students reached out to the Department of Sanitation for clarification. Someone responded, saying, “Little did I think that the personal habits of dogs could be of even academic interest to students of Harvard Law School...The sign has both meanings. It means, ‘Restrain your dog.’ It also means, ‘get him off the sidewalk’”

People also just don’t heed the signs.

As my dad so often tells me, “When we’re out of the city, I’m used to letting [Penny] pee anywhere. But now, we’re back, and the tree she walks up to has a sign that says ‘please curb your dog.’ My dog pees in the woods, and it’s totally fine! Why should I bring her to the curb? She’s uncomfortable enough as it is. The street is full of cars, and she wants to pee here in what feels like quasi-nature. Isn’t this being a good dog owner?”

The truth is that, as it is, the curb just isn’t a good place for dogs to pee. It doesn’t provide an obvious place for dog owners to lead their dog and is often loud and full of cars. The result is that it is easier to just let the dog pee where they want to, often in tree beds. This is a problem that can not be solved by messaging.

But one day on my block, everything changed.

A Better Urban Design Solution for Dog Pee

In early June, my dad texted in our family group chat: “Jack, you have to see what’s at the corner.” This is what I found, in all its glory.

Someone had covered the tree bed5 with astroturf, put a fake fire hydrant, a sign that said “Your Dog Can Pee Here, Our Tree Is Protected,” and even a dog poop bag dispenser. They even built a protector around the trunk of the tree so the pee would not go on the trunk.

Penny got very comfortable peeing there very quickly. In fact, after a few days, she would even lead me there herself. Even my dad stopped letting Miss Penny Lane pee on the other trees. Suddenly, the ‘curb your dog’ signs and tree guards seemed to work as people acknowledged that they should bring their dogs to this new area. Or maybe they were just lured in by the free poop bags.6

I know this dog rest area worked because we would always see other dog walkers at this tree as well; sometimes we’d even strike up a conversation. These were the golden days. But, like many good things, they came to an end.

As some of you might have expected, the tree died. This may have been the result of the concentrated dog pee, or of the astroturf preventing water from reaching the soil. However the mechanism worked, so the next version just needs to be not on a tree.

What Cities Can Learn from a Failed (but Promising) Experiment

The loop redirection worked immediately. Behavior changed in days, and other dog walkers adapted without being told to.

Yes, the tree died, but that was a design problem, not a mechanism problem, and shifting norms is much harder than refining a design. For example, instead of being on a tree, this rest area could be on the curb near a hose and storm drain so it can be cleaned. For more on this read the “Design Playbook” where I expand on this.

We don’t need to convince thousands of dog owners to care more. We just need to give them somewhere obvious to go, and the system will rearrange itself.

For too long the question has been how to stop dogs from peeing in a place, but the right question is where we want it to happen.

Do you want to try something similar in your neighborhood or think more about redirecting dog pee? Read this follow up “Design Playbook” post for a practical pilot proposal.

Are you someone who can do something about this?7 Reach out; let’s make it happen. I’m happy to help plan, raise money, pilot, and evaluate.

Thanks for reading! If you have made it this far thinking about dog pee, we might get along. If you’re excited about practical8 ideas for big changes with a little effort, stick around. This post is part of a series on how small design changes reshape cities

1

Miss Penny Lane is a particularly anxious dog, especially when there are loud trucks. I even tried buying her noise-cancelling headphones. Sadly, they didn’t work.